– Breakout players of the 2011 college football season. What Watkins and De’Anthony Thomas have been able to do as true freshman is just incredibly impressive, especially given how many roles each play for their teams. I could watch highlights of both guys all day.

Everyone falling all over themselves to write these Hitchens hagiographies. Look, if you want to give the man a proper send-off, in the way he would have appreciated, your article should be titled something like “Christopher Hitchens, A Life: Exposing an Arrogant, Fraudulent, Nitwit.” It should be described as “trenchant” and “vituperative,” and it should include hidden allusions to , at a minimum, Shakespeare and Homer.

Anonymous

There are plenty of those out there too. I saw some in The Nation, the Chronicle, I think the Atlantic and multiple other outlets. In the interest of equal time, here are two:

So I don’t seem like I’m piling on the dead, let me start by saying that Christopher Hitchens was unquestionably one of, if not the, most gifted rhetoricians of the past twenty years. But the first sentence of the salon article kind of sums up how I feel: “The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian’s fixation
on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis,
he became one himself.” The Nation article touches on the issue that makes me most uncomfortable – the lionization of Hitchens’s alcoholism. I’m no teetotaler but being drunk, regularly, at 2 pm is not an admirable trait.

I’m less interested in criticisms of Hitchens’s specific political stances; if you were reading him to determine what the “right” political beliefs were, you were reading him for the wrong reasons.

Paul Meisel

I always found Hitchens entirely too sure of himself to be attractive as an intellectual. A willingness to explore alternatives, to hear out opposing views, to occasionally doubt oneself, is not the way to win arguments at social gatherings…. but it is the appropriate way to pursue real intellectual thought, IMHO.

ender

Why post anything about Hitchens? Is it really necessary? If he’s a hero of yours, that’s a damn shame.